The one Pink Floyd show that Roger Waters said completely “destroyed” him
Nothing that Roger Waters ever did was going to happen without a little bit of heart behind it.
He was an artist in every sense of the word, and if he didn’t feel like he was doing justice to the work that he made, he knew that it was better to scrap the whole thing and move on to something different. That may have been what eventually forced him out of Pink Floyd, but that didn’t mean he was done with his past, either.
If Waters had his way, though, The Final Cut would have been the final proper Pink Floyd album. I mean, in many ways it was, considering Waters doesn’t consider records like A Momentary Lapse of Reason or The Division Bell good enough to carry the band’s name, but that doesn’t make them any less great. Waters wasn’t the almighty ruler of the group, but he could go back and toy with the material if he wanted to as well.
While it’s clear that no one was really expecting whatever the hell he was trying to do when remaking Dark Side of the Moon in the 2020s, it was worth it to hear what he was up to when bringing some of those old songs back to life live. It might sting a little bit knowing that David Gilmour isn’t there to sing some of the best pieces of their classic songs, but chances are everyone would feel cheated going to see Waters and not hear something like ‘Wish You Were Here’ or ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.
But Waters isn’t the kind of person to put on a greatest hits show every single time he plays. He’s an ever-evolving artist, and that often means taking records like The Wall and blowing them up to massive proportions. There was no way that the band would have enough money to tour the record for year-long tours or anything, but the version that Waters performed in Berlin in 1990 is still one of the most gargantuan productions any rockstar has taken on.
The performance itself was already star-studded with people like Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison having parts, but Waters admitted that he came back licking his wounds, saying, “It completely destroyed me. They came and asked me to do it in October. We went on July 21st I think it was. And the intervening months were an absolute nightmare. It wasn’t just getting the permission. I mean when we first started talking about it there were still guys wandering around with machine guns killing anybody who walked out into that piece of land.”
Most people wouldn’t have had the best time playing next to what could have been an all-out war zone, but even the show itself ran into some technical glitches. During the performance of ‘Mother’, the sound cut out, and while it is admittedly pretty funny seeing Waters do his best dance routine to distract everyone for a second, that didn’t stop him from being frustrated that the whole thing had the potential to fall apart at any second.
Then again, a lot of the performers pull off the material a lot better than you’d expect. Cyndi Lauper is far from the first person you would think of to sing ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, but she works magnificently well, as well as Thomas Dolby coming out to play the role of the schoolteacher. And you know that when you give the role of the judge to Tim Curry, he was going to eat that shit up from the minute he got onstage.
But as a whole, The Wall’s performance in Berlin is always going to be more of an interesting fascination for casual fans of Floyd. None of the renditions taint what the original album was, but seeing a cast of characters on par with ‘We Are the World’ is far more interesting than Waters putting on an entire concert by himself.
